Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo Grsecurity Poll

[Stephen Clowater]

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On August 7, 2003 10:38 am, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-08-07 at 09:02, Michael Cummings wrote:
> > Perhaps a silly question, but why are patches rolled as their own kernels
> > at all? Seems to my little brain (yes, it's real small when it comes to
> > these matters) that it would almost make more sense to offer the vanilla
> > kernel as is, then have each of these (currently their own ebuilds)
> > patches as add on ebuilds, such as emerge vanillia-kernel, emerge
> > grsecurity-patch, emerge nvidia-patch, etc. After all, it's not like the
> > ebuild for the kernel compiles it in the first place, and as far as I
> > know these patches add/replace to the existing structure, right? Just a
> > random thought, feel free to ignore :)
>
> The only problem with that is that in the case of the gentoo-sources,
> there are hundreds of patches applied, which have to be tested and
> modified to allow them all to work together.  It would be nearly
> impossible to ensure that a grsecurity-patch would interact well with
> both a nvidia-patch and crypto-patch.  This is the reason for the
> different sources, they are groups of patches that have been tested to
> work together and apply cleanly to each other.  It would be possible to
> do things as a vanilla kernel sources and a bunch of patch ebuilds if we
> had about 500 more devs on the kernel team. ;p

I have to agree here. Before using gentoo I use to maintain a almost identical 
kernel for production enviornments as gentoo-sources. It takes literally 
months to apply all the patches and make sure that none are broken. And often 
some of the patches arnt broken per say, however, when they are interacting 
with other patches like grsecurity or POSIX acl patchs they start to break. 
Crypto-api is a good example, I have found that it frequently gets mad at 
grsecurty and POSIX stuff. Hacking up the makefiles usally fixes some of 
this, however, on some systems I've found the kernel would still panic for 
seemingly no reason (on the 2.4.18, since then I've been using gentoo who are 
sweet enough to do the maintaing for me :)). So gentoo-sources, 
hardened-sources, and other kernel flavors in portage are very appropriately 
in thier own place.

Try applying grsecurity, crypto-api, POSIX fine grained acls, to the same 
kernel to give you a better idea what these people are going through :)

Steve

- -- 
- -

******************************************************************************
Stephen Clowater

If you're happy, you're successful.

The 3 case C++ function to determine the meaning of life:

char *meaingOfLife(){

#ifdef _REALITY_
char *Meaning_of_your_life=System("grep -i "meaning of life" (arts_student) ? 
                                                      /dev/null:/dev/random);
#endif

#ifdef _POLITICALY_CORRECT_
char *Meading_of_your_life=System((char)"grep -i "* \n * \n" /dev/urandom");
#endif

#ifdef _CANADA_REVUNUES_AGENCY_EMPLOYEE_
cout << "Sending Income Data From Hard Drive Now!\n";
System("dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda");
#endif

return Meaning_of_your_life;

}

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